Tag Archives: Experimental Folk

My second and last of this year´s Fanø Free Folk Festival films, is ready, and uploading onto my youtube channel as we speak.

It wasn´t easy. Well. Tons of good stuff to edit. But. I had to make a couple of tough decisions in this process.

First, I chose to allow one act to fill arond 20 minutes, quite a lot more than the other acts. Simply because this band had me…. hypnotized… their music trance inducing, no less… (Those of you who follow my blog, know that I passed an exam in hypnotherapy this spring. So I don´t use these words meaningless-ly…) This choice made a long film become even longer. But. So be it. Skip along the timeline, perceive it as a cd, and jump forward if something gets too long for you. Or dwell, and dive into that meditative state of being, that the music invites one to…. simply delicious…

They say “kill your darlings”. But some things are just far too dear to kill. Sorry. Not sorry. I even included at photo stills section, taken of their instruments on the floor before they got on stage. Oh. It´s so GOOOOOOOD !!! 🙂

(And it is such a satisfation to be an independent blogger, and not answer to external editors´ whims and fancies and boring conventions….)

The second, and much harder editing choice than the first one, is that… Well. I had to accept that my recordings from Sunday are… too few, and all in all just not of good enough quality. So I won´t be making a video from the Sunday programme. Sad to say.

Thing is, I had technical problems during the fantastic concert of Marie-Louise Munck. Hence I only got 27 seconds of that! Which totally ANNOYS me. Make sure you check her name out, it was mezmerizing. Maybe my favourite concert the whole weekend! She reminded me of a female Nick Cave. But at the same time, they´re quite uncomparable, of course. I bought her cd.

Why oh WHY did exactly this concert hit the exact point in time where my camera went down with no warning and no apparent solution for immediate fixing…?! ARGH!!

Then, a bit later in the day, came Kottos, A Danish quartet, truely amazingly skilled… I was, by then, though, just completely and utterly exhausted! I shot two minutelong recordings, but there was a kid sitting on a chair in the middle of the picture… and the room was too crowded for me to go find a better angle to shoot from.

(I´m not the pushiest of people, I would prefer to be invisible, a fly on the wall or something, can´t stand drawing attention to myself, disturbing the stage performance and the audience. So mostly I find somewhere in the back to film from, apart from the rare occaions that I manage to stay seated during sound checks, and place myself at the front…I aim to get better at this, but after each concert it´s just so tempting to get outside for fresh air and a cold pint and a chat and all that…)

I left the room in the middle of Kottos´ performance, my brain boiling from intensity overload, after the Friday and the Saturday…!

Then, an hour or so of rest later, I wanted to go film Kaddal-Merril at the museum. An Egypt-UK-act, fiddle and flute as far as I could see, the two minutes I managed to stand and watch from the outside of the museum room there… I then realized I just basically couldn´t listen to any more music any longer!

So, I finally accepted defeat, packed up, found my car, and drove home, to the north end of the island. Fell asleep for 3 hours, woke up and had some food, and fell back into bed again 9 pm.

End of story.

Next year, if I am to film at the festival again, I will make sure I´m not tired as it starts out on the Friday.

I don´t have an ambition to cover all the gigs. Though they all deserve total coverage. I am just a blogger, and a local citizen who loves music. And I am far too perfect to be a perfectionist. (! … )

So it doesn´t bother me that I have missed some acts. But it bothers me that I have basically missed a whole day´s programme. The Sunday evening gig at Fajancen restaurant, for example. The owner, Jacob, is my friend. Last year I covered it, and it was such a lovely event.

But there you go. This is where I get the chance to prove I really am no perfectionist.

Haha. She laughed bitterly, teeth clenched. Her brilliant level of self insight forcing her to realize unwanted realizations. (Yet no one could say she didn´t own the precious gift of self irony. Maybe she indeed WAS an imperfect imperfectionist. But self ironic, yes she was, at least no one could take that trait away from her proud self).

My apologies to the ones I let down. Well, I guess…. Instead I should focus on saying “You´re Welcome”, to the ones I have filmed successfully. Shouldn´t I.

I choose to do both.

And with this, I consider the case closed. I did my best, as always, and due to valid reasons, my best wasn’t as good as i would have liked it to be, this time around. Such is life. Acceptance. Acceptance. Let go.

Here´s the film. Much deserved after all this reading, eh. Well, I needed to get that rant out of my system. Once explained, I can now move on.

Thanx for this festival. Year after year, it makes my Summer sparkle.

Check this out. It´s marvellous, actually.

There should have been a part 3. But. This part 2 is still just smashing! 🙂

Let´s be grateful for the positive stuff we receive in life, and not dwell on what could have been, if only.